The present invention relates in general to digital processing and more specifically to a model for the use of dynamic computing environments in the sales cycle of software vendors.
Sales teams of organizations that sell software go through a cycle of internal preparations, product demonstrations to potential customers, product evaluations by customers, feedback from customers, and transition of ownership through an installation/customization process.
During the stages of internal preparations and product demonstrations, software vendors as well as their customers often face issues such as lack of availability or difficulty in managing computing environments when installing software on specific computers. Additionally, the installation of software on computers can be time consuming and extremely complicated. Often, administrators must be used to install the software. This is especially true as computer systems become more and more complicated. With the advent of the client-server software model, demonstration and evaluation of a software system requires execution on a network of heterogeneous computers. For instance, an e-business software system consisting of a web-server, an application server, and a database server would require a network consisting of at least one web-server to handle requests from clients, in addition to one or more application servers and one or more database servers. These networks require capital expenditures for infrastructure that a company may not want to commit to without first knowing whether the software and hardware will fit its needs. Therefore, customers may be reluctant to test and evaluate software if expenditures need to be made in order to perform evaluation leading to subsequent sale. Also, customers will be especially reluctant because setting up evaluation systems takes considerable time and effort. Additionally, some evaluation systems may not be needed after evaluation and may become useless. Thus, customers may not want to commit to initial capital expenditures associated with installing, configuring, and testing the software during the evaluation phase.
Additionally, customers may not even want to use their own computers to test and evaluate software. Customers may be afraid of corruption or crashes affecting their pre-existing network. Thus, a sales team may not even be allowed to install a software product at a customer's site. And even if customers do install the software on their own computers, the computing environment most likely will be isolated from the customer's network in order to isolate their network from corruption or crashes associated with the software. Thus, extra precautions are needed to install software at a customer's site.
During a demonstration phase, a sales team can demonstrate the software from a computer with the software installed on it. This requires that the sales team and customer be physically present in the same locality. Alternatively, a sales team may demonstrate the software from a remote location and have the customer view the results of the execution of the software through a web browser or other interface. In both of these cases, the sales team and customer are restricted in their usage of the software. In the first case, the sales team and customers must be in the same location in order for a demonstration to take place. In the second case, the customer can only view the results of the software process and cannot interact directly with the process. In both cases, a pleasant customer experience during evaluation of a software product is predicated on minimal time and effort to set up the evaluation, together with the flexibility to experiment with the software.
During an evaluation phase, a customer must typically download the software from a disk, CD, vendor's web site, etc. The software is then installed on the customer's computers and the evaluation phase can begin. After the customer's installation of the software, the vendor has no interaction with the customer's use of the software. Thus, if problems with the installation, subsequent configuration, or use occur with the software, a vendor's only option is to send a support provider out to the customer's site or to try and fix the problem over the telephone. In most scenarios, the problem cannot be fixed immediately and the customer may lose valuable evaluation time, decide not buy the software, or buy another product.
Also, because the vendor has no interaction with the customer's use of the software, the vendor cannot track customer usage for quantity and quality, usage time and periods, patterns of usage, trouble spots, system failures, etc. The only tracking that is typically possible is through post-evaluation feedback, which is slow, subjective, and inaccurate. This feedback does not help the vendor to pro-actively alleviate the customer's concerns about the features and capabilities of the software and often leads to an unsatisfactory customer experience with the software. Furthermore, the tracking process is inefficient because it is not completely automated. Also, effective feedback may result in a configuration change or tuning of the software and the evaluation phase may have to be repeated. In such case, prior art models lead to under-utilization of resources between the two evaluation phases by the replication of set-up time and effort preceding each evaluation.
Typically, software must be customized for a specific customer's needs. However, customization is often not performed due to lack of resources and lack of incentive (due to the vendor's inability to determine whether or not the result of an evaluation would lead to a sale and consequently recognizable revenue). Often, customers are asked to “believe in good faith” that the software, when purchased, would indeed be deployed per the customization needs of the customer. However, post sale deployment often involves time and effort on the customer's part, thus risking the customer's own products and services that potentially depend on the use of the software. The entire software sales cycle, from pre-sale demonstration through evaluation to post sale deployment may take around four to six months, which in the present days of shrinking software life cycle is unacceptable.
During the transition of ownership through an installation/customization process, configurations for purchased software may be different from the configuration used in the testing environment. Additionally, the testing computing environment may have been isolated from the customer's active network. Thus, re-installation of the software will have to be performed each time the software in the customer's active network changes. Therefore, additional problems may occur during re-installation. Also, the transition will not be seamless because the software cannot be automatically used by the customer on their network. Typically, reasons include that the software needs to be integrated with the customer's own software and third party components and the software needs to be tuned for performance.
The efficiency of a sales team in all of the above phases is necessary and important to sell software. With the proliferation of software companies, a customer may have many choices for a desired software application. Thus, any delay may cause the sales team to lose the potential contract because some customers cannot afford to lose development time and must have software systems running immediately.